


Paths Outside The Garden

by SilverDagger



Series: Paths Outside the Garden [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Ficlets, Gen, Sandman Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-02 23:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4077202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world has changed, but the Endless endure, and weave through the lives of the survivors.</p><p>Crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and probably won't make much sense without some knowledge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Delirium (Max)

**Author's Note:**

> There will be seven of these ficlets, but each is meant to stand on its own.
> 
> Written for a kink meme prompt: http://madmaxkink.dreamwidth.org/450.html?thread=186306#cmt186306

The horizon shimmers.

Max chases it like it's something he can catch, hands steady on the wheel, nothing much ahead or behind. Hard to say how long he's been driving. Time seems to stretch and blur out here, with hours and days that last forever or pass in an eyeblink, but he hasn't seen water in he can't remember how long, month maybe, and his supply is running low. Lots of guzz, though. The smell of it has worked its way into his clothes, his hair, his dreams. Mountains rise ahead of him, but never get closer.

He's not alone in the car. He doesn't know where he picked her up, the little girl who rides beside him. He doesn't know her name. He only knows that she isn't his daughter - did he have a daughter once? - and she doesn't come from anywhere or belong anywhere, and she isn't going anywhere, no matter how far he drives. When he looks at her straight-on, she isn't there.

That doesn't seem strange to him any longer. Lots of things aren't there when you look at them, but slink around the edges, or take root in the cracks of the world. Memories. Ghosts. Water.

He swallows, throat parched. There is no water here.

Do yOU liKe dOgGiEs?

She's in the backseat now, the girl who isn't there, sprawled gawky and angular and twisting a length of string between her fingers. Old game. Cat's cradle. Her voice is a crackle of radio static, the white noise of rain on rock and the burble and gurgle of streams run dry. 

He doesn't look at her, doesn't answer. She doesn't stop talking. She hasn't stopped talking since he picked her up.

I LikE dogGieS aNd fRoGGiEs anD elePHanT-flAvOreD icE CrEam a n d SoNgs mAdE oUt of tHe naMes of CitieS wE fOrGot hOW to drEaM AnD thE dREamS of CitIEs wE foRgOT h o w To NAmE.

Max grunts, twists the wheel, keeps driving. Pale sand stretches ahead, an endless, featureless waste. There aren't any cities here, with names or dreams or without them.

She isn't his daughter. His daughter doesn't have mismatched eyes, blue and green and full of swimming things. He doesn't have a daughter. 

I hAd a dOG oNcE. But. I Lo s t HiM.

He shouldn't talk to her. Sure sign of madness, talking to people who aren't really there. His hands tighten on the wheel, and he can't help but laugh at that, even though it hurts his throat and his ears, the sound of it after all that voiceless nothing.

Ought to quit this, maybe. Stop the car, leave it for the scavengers, head out into the desert and just walk until he stops walking. Or until he finds water, or someplace good. He knows which will happen first, but it's getting harder and harder to care.

BUt yO u Can't sToP n o w. WE haVen'T f o un d tHE plAce yeT.

"What place?" he says. Sure sign of madness, he thinks. Sure sign.

WheRe yOU'rE g o i n g. 

"Not going anywhere."

YoU Are g o i n g aNywh e R e. 

The girl dangles upside-down over the seat, kicking her feet in the air. He can see her in the rearview mirror. Frayed netting. Chains. She chews on a ragged fingernail, and a lizard scuttles across her face and disappears into her hair with a flick of a lucent rainbow tail, too quick to catch. Every time he looks at her, she looks different.

YoU haVe to Be gOinG. anYWhEre. alWayS. ThaT's whY you ArE. 

He shouldn't talk to her. He shouldn't talk. To her. He shouldn't talk.

thEre aRE the FiSH. and. saLt. anD. WhErE iT. DoesN'T. HurT. ThaTs wherE YoU'rE gOiNg.

He blinks against the glare, and against the sudden taste of salt in the back of his throat, and brushes matted hair away from his stinging eyes. Something brightly-colored swims through his vision half-seen - an animal, a heat-mirage, a twist of hair. There had been oceans once, full of creatures like that, their rainbow scales glinting like sun against sand. There might be oceans out there still. He. Can't remember. Maybe it's all desert now, as far as the world extends, all dust and cracked rock. 

dO yoU ThInK yoU c a n FIND thE pLaCe?

"No."

oH. OkAY. 

The girl shifts in place, rights herself, the string dancing between her fingers in patterns it's hard to look at too close.

DoN't be SAD. We cAN gO t o ThE othEr p l a c e FiRst. It haS my BOyS thERe. I liKe tHEm.

She smiles. She's got metal in her teeth.

ShINy anD cHrOmE BoYs.

She leans forward, looking over his shoulder now, her hands on the back of the seat. From the corner of his eye, he can see bubbles rise in a cloud around her, iridescent, and pop with a sound like the plinking notes of a music box he remembers from - where? Somewhere long ago, somewhere safe and lost.

He keeps his eyes on the road ahead. This isn't real.

ThEy'll liKe YOu. YoU hAve goOD b-l-o-o-d.

This isn't real. It isn't real. It isn't -

gO thAt WAy, she says, pointing at something too far to see or not there at all. ThAT's whEre yOU hAve To GO.

The little bright thing that had been swimming around his head - the fish, he remembers, it was called a fish - darts out the window now, racing ahead of him along a trail that only it can see. And then more of them, rising from the sand, the quicksilver flash of them leading him onward through the shimmering waterless deep. The girl who isn't there laughs in wonder at the sight, clapping her hands, and for a single second he feels nothing so much as a sharp, aching peal of delight.

 _Shiny and chrome,_ he thinks. They seem to know where they're going, which is more than he can say for himself. If nothing else, at least it will be somewhere new.

He follows.


	2. Despair (Cheedo)

It's not so bad here.

Cheedo misses her family, it's true, her mama and papa and her riotous troop of brothers, and she misses the sky at night and the wind sweeping wild across the desert, and even though she wants to be a brave girl like her mama told her, her mind always skitters away from the thought of what's going to happen when she gets her first blood.

But there's food, salted meat and sweet berries and plump grubs, and there's a pool in the center of the chamber with all the water anyone can drink, and everything here is clean and soft and beautiful. There are books full of poetry. She's educated now. It's the sort of life that anyone out there would give their arm to have a chance at, and when she reminds herself of that, it's easy to pretend that the door that keeps her in will open to her touch, and she's here because it's what she's always wanted.

The others are nice too, mostly, though she hardly knows them. Her new sisters, the - the _other_ wives. 

There are four of them, plus Cheedo. That's what the records say. Five wives. There's Angharad, who wiped away her tears the first night she came here and told her she could be strong. Capable, who can build anything and break anything and then build it again different, and the Dag, who spends all her time staring into the pool like she can see a future there, and Toast, who laughs at her and calls her fragile, then offers her a new ribbon or half a lizard to show she doesn't mean it. Five of them. Angharad plus Capable plus the Dag plus Toast plus Cheedo. Five.

It isn't true. The records are wrong. There aren't five. The Immortan counts them up like bullets or barrels of guzzoline and thinks he knows the name and number of everything he keeps locked behind closed doors, but there's another woman who lives here with them, though no one ever speaks to her or speaks her name. 

One of the Milking Mothers, Cheedo thinks, heavy and soft and squat, with no milk left in her. She's kind, though. She's got strong arms, the kind of arms you can sink into, beautiful in her way. She braids Cheedo's hair, humming an old and tuneless song that always leaves Cheedo's chest aching like she wants to cry and can't remember how, and her hands are gentle, and her ring only sometimes catches skin.

She's always somewhere close, the sixth woman. She rocks Cheedo to sleep at night, holds her like a mother holds her child, and when she's there, it's easy to forget the way the sand used to feel beneath her bare feet and the sound of her mama's voice calling her home across the open ground, the way time slips past and leaves her stranded.

It's not so bad here. Cheedo drapes herself in soft clean cloth, eats and drinks her fill and learns to love the precious things they give her. She could get used to this life, she thinks.

It's not so bad here. It's not so bad.


	3. Destiny (Angharad)

Angharad feels, more often than not, that her steps are not her own.

It's not a new feeling. She remembers it coming over her even as a child, even before her capture. But in the hidden hold of the War Rig on the day of their escape, it fills her up until she's brimming with it, that sense of being trapped by more than walls. She's paced every corner of the vault where they kept her, and lying back in the armored dark of the Rig she paces still, restless, tracing the walls with one hand and counting the steps within the narrow confines of her mind. It won't be long. She tells herself that, four words repeated as the minutes pass. Furiosa says it's the best chance they'll ever have.

Angharad isn't sure she believes it. It's dangerous, putting your hopes in other people, letting their bargains and promises fill you up; if there was another choice, she would have made it.

She stares up at the flat roof, following the scratches in the metal as though they might show her the way out, some scribbled map across the wasteland to someplace she's never seen before. Furiosa says it won't be long. Furiosa says that it will be a straight path, a clean shot, death or freedom and no illusions about which is more likely. But in her mind, Angharad is walking still, one foot in front of the other, through a maze of concentric circles where every path that seems to lead out only ever turns back to the center.

Even in a prison, it's always possible to find a labyrinth. Especially in a prison, it's always possible to find a labyrinth, and every labyrinth is the same at its heart. Angharad closes her eyes and runs her fingers over the scars on her other arm, listening to the breathing of her sisters and the rattle of wheels over rough terrain. She remembers the knife parting skin like a canyon divides the land, and she thinks that it would be easy enough to go where the maze wants to take her, and it would probably hurt less.

*

When she opens her eyes, she's alone, and she's standing on stony ground beneath open sky. Ahead of her, she sees a broad path, with walls of red, worn-down sandstone running ahead of her on either side, shoulder-high. The air is hot and dry as the desert at midday, but there is no sun and little shadow, only ambient light. She knows she must be dreaming, but it doesn't feel like dreaming, and she's always been able to tell. It feels like she's somewhere real, and somewhere she doesn't want to be.

But the only way out of a maze is through it, and she means to find her way out of this one. She read in a book once that if you keep one hand on the wall, and take only the left or only the right at every turning, you'll reach the exit eventually. So she walks, tracing the walls with one hand, gritty stone beneath her fingers and packed red dirt beneath her feet. From time to time, she passes strange statues, most of them crumbling or broken, all of them old. Aside from that, there's nothing to differentiate where she's going from where she's been.

And then the walls open out into a circular courtyard, and she pauses, looking down. There's something on the path in front of her, half buried in dust. She bends to pick it up, finds it surprisingly cool and surprisingly heavy in her hand. It's only a little thing, a flat, round piece of metal stamped with a worn shape on one side that might be a man's head in profile, and on the other, a symbol she doesn't recognize. She brushes her thumb over it and feels three triangles with points turned inward, but when she looks again, it seems to be different, more difficult to read.

When she looks up again, she's not alone.

There's a man in front of her, grey-robed and barefoot, his heavy cowl shading a seamed and weathered face. Whether or not he's a threat, there's no way of knowing. He doesn't look like a warrior, weaponless as he is, but he holds a massive book open in one hand, and she knows he must be strong, to carry such a weight without tiring.

"Do you know what this is?" she asks, opening her hand to show him the thing she found. The man steps closer, peering down at her outstretched hand, and she realizes that his eyes are milky-pale, too opaque to be anything but blind.

"Yes," he says, even so. "I know what it is."

"Is it yours?"

"No." But he takes it from her, and as he folds it into his robes, his sleeve falls back from his wrist. She sees the chain.

"That must be heavy," she says, looking down at the book, with its locks and clasps and tiny, crabbed script. She wonders what's written there, and then realizes it might be better if she doesn't know.

"Very heavy," he says, in a voice like a door swinging closed.

"Do you wish you could put it down?"

"One day, I will," the man says. "When the last word is written and the last page turned."

"And you'll be unchained?"

He doesn't answer, but continues on his slow path, unperturbed, and no footprints mark the dust behind him. She walks beside him along the way laid out for her, past broken pillars, over stones worn smooth underfoot. Her child kicks inside her, insistent. A son, she's sure, a warlord's son, born and bound to be a warlord himself if she cannot get free. Sometimes she hates him for it, her nameless future boy, but she does not hate him now.

"How do I get out of here?" she asks. The hooded man turns to her, expressionless. She expects him to say _you don't, you never do_ , but he only reaches up and touches her forehead with fingers that feel like dry paper, no threat after all, then presses her eyes gently closed.

She wakes in the hold of the War Rig, half expecting that there will be something cool and strangely heavy resting in her palm, but of course her hand is empty. There's nothing there.

*

After the sandstorm, or perhaps before it, everything starts going wrong.

It starts with the man with the gun, and the lost time, and even though he fights beside them now, it's easy to curse him for the bullet in her leg and the pain that leaves her head swimming with nausea. But maybe it always had to go that way, cause and consequence piling up, and Angharad is no stranger to pain or to the impersonal violence of fate. She defies it, she despises it, if destiny was a man she would spit in his face, but they are not strangers.

They're running now, the seven of them, breakneck across the desert with Joe's army at their heels, and Furiosa won't say it but her clenched teeth and rigid spine make it clear enough that they're being run to ground. It's chaos out there, and it seems like the entire world is nothing but lurching motion and noise - War Boys behind them and on either side, bullets battering the armored sides of the Rig, everything happening too fast to keep track of. 

The War Rig swerves violently, throwing Angharad to the side, and she has to bite her cheek to keep from screaming from the pain in her leg. When she recovers enough to look up, her entire body goes cold.

They've hooked the rig

They've hooked the _wheel_ , and Joe's men are coming up fast from behind, dragging them back. She looks around the cab, frantic. No good. No choices. Only one way out. Furiosa is occupied, the stranger is occupied, and it's Capable who meets her eyes. Understanding passes between them in an instant. Nobody will cut that chain if they don't do it.

Time goes strange and slow as Angharad climbs out and clings to the side of the rig, holding the bolt-cutters right enough to hurt. When she looks down, she can see the road rushing past below, as deadly at this speed as any spear or bullet. So she doesn't look down.

This is the way it has to go: Angharad bears down with all her strength, throws her weight and her whole body into it. Her leg is slippery with blood, and wind buffets her, trying to tear her loose. She doesn't let go. She doesn't relent. The chain snaps. 

They're free.

Her leg gives out beneath her. 

There's time to grasp for the Rig and feel her fingers slip free, time for terror and not much else. The wind reaches up for her and drags her down, and in the instant and the eternity between the fall and the impact, she thinks she sees a hooded man with blind eyes looking down at her from somewhere distant. She sees him hold a little bright bit of metal up between two fingers, and then he flips it into the air and she sees it spin along a bright parabola, catching sunlight as it reaches the height of its arc.

She never sees it fall.


	4. Dream (The Dag)

The Dag is dreaming.

She knows she must be dreaming, because the earth where she lives when her eyes are open has never been so replete with water, or so filled with green things she's only seen before in books. Trees line the trail she walks, their overhanging branches heavy with fruit, and there are tiny plants carpeting the ground beneath her feet. _Grasses,_ she remembers from her history lessons, _they're called grasses,_ and they tickle her bare legs as she walks and spring back where she stepped, unharmed.

She needs to be careful here. She knows it isn't safe - dreaming too much, dreaming at all. She's no fool, even if she knows the others must think her a little mad. She leans her forehead against the trunk of a tree, smells the green of its leaves and feels its bark rough against her skin, and she knows exactly what that vicious old schlanger means when he laughs about how easy it is, getting addicted to water. She wants to stay here, not wake to a world where living is death by slow dehydration.

Dangerous. No good getting stuck in-between places. Paths lead where they lead, even in dreams, and this might turn to nightmare soon - her dreams often do - but staying where she is won't do anything to prevent it. So she walks, aimless and untiring, until the trees thin and she can see a fortress in the distance, rising stark as the Citadel against a cloudless sky. It's not someplace she wants to go, but the instant she thinks about being there, it's where she is, looking up at white walls and towers hung with thorny, climbing vines.

Flowers dot the brambles, vivid red among the green and brown, their multilayered petals unfolding in radial complexity. She reaches to touch one, then jerks back in sudden pain when a thorn pierces her hand, though she's certain there had been no thorn there before. There's a spot of blood on her palm, and as she licks it from her skin, she hears a rustle of cloth behind her. She freezes, shudders against her will. _This is it,_ she thinks. _It's a nightmare now._

"Careful," the stranger says. "These dreams cut." It's a male voice, resonant, and she whirls to face him with a snarl, the taste of her own blood still on her tongue. White robes, she sees, white hair, the whole shape of him gaunt and ghostly and inhuman. The only darkness in him is his eyes, deep empty holes shot through with pinpricks of light.

The warlord here. He must be, and she wonders whether he means to trap her here amid all this splendid verdancy, kept for a demon's bride. Poor fool, if he thinks he can do worse to her than has been done in waking. But he only moves past her to trace a spidery finger along the curve of a petal, familiar, almost fond. He grew them, maybe. Maybe a man who grows such things cannot be entirely bad. Possible, too, that a man who grows such things cannot be entirely real.

"What are they?" she asks, tilting her head in the direction of the flowers and the thorns.

"Roses," he says. "The dreams of roses. A flower that grew in your world once, and now lives only in my kingdom."

"And who are you, then?" she says, with a smile that's more bared teeth than anything else. The pale man seems to hesitate, and she realizes for the first time how incongruously young he looks, like a War Boy before his first raid, and how impossibly old.

"I have been called Daniel, from time to time."

"'S a funny name for a warlord," she says.

"I have other names. I doubt you'll find them more to your liking."

"Like what? Lord and Master? Devourer of Souls?"

"Dream," he says. "Prince of Stories."

The Dag has to laugh at that, though she can't imagine it's wise. Dreams are pretty things, her old grandmother used to tell her, but they won't put guzzoline in your tank or food in her belly. Not that she has any want for the one any longer, nor any use for the other.

"Useless, then," she says. "Not much call for either, since they poisoned the world."

He lifts his head sharply, and lights flare in his fathomless eyes, burning cold and distant. She wonders if she's angered him. Not wise, _not wise_ , but she hardly cares; he's only a warlord like any other, and he doesn't own her, and he can drag her screaming over coals before she'll take back a word she's spoken. But when she looks again, she sees no rage or injured dignity, no emotion she understands at all.

"Come," he says, and starts walking as if she has no choice but to follow. Imperious bastard. It rankles, makes her want to spite him, spit in his eye, but she wants to see where he's taking her more, so follow she does.

The landscape melts and blurs around them, shifting as dreams do, and she reminds herself with every step and every change of place that it isn't a nightmare _yet_. He leads her through gardens, through stone halls and earthen tunnels and down a corridor of interminable windows and doors, each built of a different material and opening into a different scene. They walk that hall until they reach a door that looks older than the rest, made of iron and rusting at the hinges, and he beckons her through it into a room cluttered with old things of indiscernible purpose. She sees wooden animals and dolls' heads, glass jars and hanging ornaments and a box with a pair of metal antennae sitting atop it, and a leather pouch hanging on the wall beside the door that Daniel, Prince of Worthless Stories, takes and opens with care.

"Do you see this?" he says, shaking something out into his hand. Seeds. A multitude of them, small and brown, and before she can stop herself, she reaches out to touch. He takes her hand and turns it over, his skin cool and unnervingly smooth to the touch, then pours them into her palm and folds her fingers over them.

"They are not dead," he says, "while you still dream of them."

The Dag looks down at her hands, and the unassuming, almost weightless treasure she's holding. Dream seeds. The seeds of dreams. She cannot imagine what soil they would grow in, or where she might find a place to plant them, but she's willing to try.

"Can I take them back with me?"

"No more than you can take any dream back to the world of waking."

She isn't surprised. Still, it hurts, like water slipping through her fingers and away. Too easy, too easy to get addicted to dreaming.

"Useless," she mutters again, to cover the hollowness in her chest that hope always leaves. "Bloody... fucking... useless."

"Perhaps so," Daniel says, not unkindly, and presses her hand to her heart. "But keep them with you all the same."

*

She wakes with tears in her eyes and the room full of lost things still clear in her mind, nothing but wasteland outside. She sits up, scrubs the salt from her face with the back of her hand, curses softly and then louder because words are the only things she owns that can wound.

"Is something wrong," a woman's voice asks, from just inside the door. The Imperator, furious Furiosa, poking her head into the Dag's small corner of the bedchamber and looking, despite her best efforts, almost concerned. She serves their smeg of a husband, but she isn't bad, and it's hard to hate her. She's kept secrets for them before. She tries to make things better, when she can.

"I don't know how to get back there," the Dag says.

"Where?" the Imperator demands, and the Dag shakes her head helplessly. She tries to explain that it was nothing, only a dream, but her words escape her, and all she's left with is, "the green place."

The Imperator stares at her for a second, face blank, then turns abruptly away.

"There is no green place," she says.

"I know that," the Dag says. "I'm not a child." But the Imperator doesn't listen. She's already retreating, off on her own business or, more likely, her master's, and her footsteps echo angry down the hall. Just as well. No one here has any pity to spare.

The Dag falls backward against her pillows and curls her fingers closed against her chest, trying to forget the dry texture of seeds against her skin. It's too late. They've taken root, and the dream lingers, more stubborn than she is. She doubts she'll be getting rid of it any time soon.

That ought to worry her, or leave her angry. Her grandmother would laugh, and say she ought to stamp it out, and she mostly agrees and mostly believed it. But in the dark soil of her heart, there's something growing that feels almost like hope.


	5. Desire (Toast)

There's another woman who lives here with them.

Or maybe it isn't a woman. It's hard to tell, for a person only ever seen in glimpses and reflections, a flash of narrow hips or the elegant curve of a shoulder but never the whole shape of them, never straight-on. All Toast knows is that ever since the day they tossed her into old Joe's vault, still scratching and biting and bleeding, she's been seeing _someone_ at the edge of her vision, never too far away. None of her sisters ever seemed to acknowledge it, or even to see anything at all.

Used to be, back when old Joe ruled the Citadel, the stranger was always there, hiding around one corner or another, constant as the heat and the threat of thirst. Used to be, Toast figured she was losing her grip, and she couldn't force herself to care. Anyone would, shut up in a cage with nothing to do except keep pretty and dread the nightfall, and back then there was nothing she could do but keep it pent up inside, all the rage and all the yearning, until she was so full up with both that her body felt too small to contain it. So why wouldn't she be going a little crazy? Why wouldn't she see things - _the flash of golden eyes reflected in a pool, a sleek smile and a double shadow, red lips and white teeth_ \- that she knows aren't really there?

It's different now. Joe's nothing but food for vultures, Toast can go where she likes when she likes and doesn't have to make herself pretty for anyone, and there are days when she never sees even the blurred edge of that old familiar shadow. But the sixth woman - if woman she is - is still here, lurking at the fringes of the Citadel, in the gardens or at the edge of the reservoir. Toast doesn't think she'll ever get away from her completely.

Easy to ignore, though. Mostly. Easy to ignore except for those days when the sky is charged with lightning and heavy with rain that won't fall, or when the wind blows from the east, carrying a trace of strange and heady perfume with it.

It's one of those days that finds her deep in the quiet underground of the Citadel, away from the heat of the day and the eyes of friends and strangers, trying to burn off some of her restlessness by practicing her knifework. It's never enough to take the edge off, not really, but she enjoys the exertion of it, the work of honing her body for a purpose that has nothing to do with bearing someone else's sons. 

She's just getting into the rhythm of it when she notices movement behind her, reflected in the edge of her blade. When she turns to look, there's someone watching her. It's not one of her sisters, or any of the once-War Boys. It's someone Toast has never seen before - _oh, but that's a lie_ \- with eyes that shine a burnished gold, someone who moves closer with perilous intent.

Toast holds her ground, though in her hidden heart she doesn't know if it's because she won't move away or because she can't. The stranger steps forward, tilts Toast's chin up with long slender fingers and stands looking down at her with what could almost be amused affection, if not for the avid edge of that smile.

"You _are_ one of mine, aren't you?" The voice sounds like honey tastes, slow and sweet and almost intoxicating, and Toast still can't tell if it's a man or a woman she's looking at, but she can feel a heavy, liquid heat settling low in her belly and between her legs, an almost pleasurable ache. It's the first time she can ever remember _wanting_ to get fucked. It's a weird feeling. She isn't sure she likes it.

She doesn't think it much matters to the stranger whether she likes it or not. Her hand clenches around the hilt of her knife, and she swallows hard, trying not to think about the promise in those eyes, or how easy it would be to say _yes._ The stranger's fingernails press into her skin, and _no,_ Toast thinks, shivering deep, _I know you. You're not such a stranger at all._

"I'm one of mine," she says, and steps back.


	6. Destruction (Capable and Nux)

Capable's mother is a sturdy woman, dark-haired and weather-worn, with the comforting smell of motor oil and old leather hanging about her. She's up to her elbows in grease with the hood of a derelict old Cadillac open in front of her and the engine dissected, showing Capable all the parts and how to find the problem and fix it up again, and Capable listens in reverent silence. Their clan doesn't worship the engine like the raiders do up north, but it's wise, her mother says, to honor whatever keeps you living when everything else wants you dead. That includes water and greenery and fuel, and it includes machinery.

Capable's good with machinery. Everyone says it. Could be a blackthumb when she grows older, like her mother, who leans over her shoulder now and guides her hands as they work together to repair the engine piece by piece.

"Your father never had a knack for it," she says with a fond smile. "Not like you do. I swear, everything that man touched fell to pieces."

"Who is he?"

"An itinerant."

Capable isn't sure what an itinerant is, but her mother doesn't sound unhappy about it, so she figures it must be a good thing to be, or at least not very bad. Better than dead, anyway, or a raider.

That's about all you can ask for from a father, and all her mother's ever been willing to volunteer to begin with, so Capable stops worrying about that and focuses on the lesson. There's no sure way, her mother says, to keep things from breaking down around you, but this comes close. This has to be good enough.

*

Capable isn't actually sure whether she's met her father or not.

She might have. She likes to imagine sometimes that she has, though of course the truth is she probably hasn't. It's more likely that he's just a man who comes by from time to time and then leaves again, back into the wasteland where only ferals and raiders survive for long. But he has the same hair as she does, and he talks to her like she's a real person, not just a kid, so she likes him, follows him around whenever he comes to barter and watches from a safe distance.

And then one day, when she's nearing her eighth year, she sees him sitting on a rock in the shade with his pack beside him. He's bent forward over a scrap of canvas, drawing on it with charcoal, and when she gets closer she sees that he's not making a map or anything else that might be useful. Just a picture, and not even a very good one, a mess of sketchy, uneven lines marking out the shape of the rocky bluffs in the distance and the impossible green that covers them. Capable clambers up the rock beside him, and sits, elbows on knees, mimicking his posture. She isn't supposed to talk to strangers on her own, but the way she sees it, he's not such a stranger anymore.

"Are you a road warrior?" she asks him. He looks up from his drawing, blinking like he's surprised to see her there.

"I'm not much of a warrior at all, these days," he says. "What about you?"

"Me? I fix things," she tells him, grinning wide.

"Do you, now?" he says.

"I break them too, sometimes, on accident. But I always fix them up again, so that's alright."

The man nods like she's said something clever, instead of just prattling like she always does when she doesn't think to stop her mouth from running like a turbocharged engine, and she's not sure whether she's proud of that or just embarrassed.

"Tell you a secret?" he says.

"Sure," she says, with a one-shouldered shrug. It's never smart to sound too eager for a secret, even when you really want to know.

"That's what the universe does too." He sets down his charcoal and looks up at the green, speaking almost absently now. "Every instant, everything you see - everything you don't see. All of it. Destroys and recreates itself, only a little different from how it was before."

Capable looks around, frowning dubiously at the bare sand and scattered piles of rock that make up their campsite. "Mostly just looks destroyed, to me."

He nods at that, too, pensive. "It does seem so."

"I don't understand what you're trying to say," she says, frustrated, not quite angry. Of course he isn't making sense. He lives in the wastes, even if he doesn't always act like it. They're all crazy out there.

He gets to his feet, and even though he's still holding his scribbled-on canvas in one hand, there's something different about him. He's taller than she remembers, and suddenly kind of huge and distant, like a sandstorm, the kind that scours metal and wears down rock and strips flesh to bone. He looks like a warrior, even if he says he isn't, and she doesn't know him, and she doesn't know why she ever thought she did. She shuts her eyes tightly, and it's like she's been staring too long at something painfully bright, afterimages dancing on the insides of her eyelids.

And then his heavy hand settles on her shoulder, and when she opens her eyes again he's nothing but what he's always been, just a drifter who draws shitty pictures and always has something interesting to barter with or give away for nothing. Someone who's always been kind to her, no more and no less.

"Take care of yourself," he says. "Nothing lasts. You shouldn't forget that."

She already knows it. Every child of the wasteland does. But he's trying to be helpful, stranger though he is, so she nods seriously, like she's considering it, and she promises to remember.

He leaves that night just as the sun is setting, and just like Capable is never quite surprised to see his ancient truck rattling across the sands toward their camp, she isn't surprised to see him go. He gives up a hundred-liter barrel of water and some guns in trade for a full tank of guzz, and a scrap of canvas in trade for a promise to remember about the universe and how things change, and then he sets out in the direction of the salt flats, and she doesn't think he's coming back.

"Man like that isn't built for staying in one place for long," Capable's mother says, almost wistful. They watch the plume of diesel smoke rising in his wake, and Capable could ask, but she doesn't.

They're heading north tomorrow themselves, out toward those bluffs. It's dangerous country, raider territory, but where there's green, there's water, and with one of their old oases running dry, there's no choice but to seek it.

 _Flip a coin,_ Capable's mother likes to say, when their clan is driving into danger. _See what happens next. No point getting attached to the future you thought you'd have._

Capable runs her fingers over the rough fabric she's got folded in her pocket, and wonders if there's any point getting attached to anything at all.

*

The War Rig rumbles over the sands, nothing ahead but emptiness and nothing but enemies behind.

Up in the lookout, Capable sits and looks backwards at the desert falling steadily away behind them, sun setting like blood on the horizon and a War Boy leaning his head on her shoulder. He's heavier and stronger than he looks, with his wiry and wasted body, and he's warm against her bare skin. Too warm, really, slick with fever-sweat, stricken with shivers. No threat. He smells like sickness beneath the clay and grime, and there's nothing she can do about that - can't take apart a person and put him back together right, not when what's killing him is inside his bones - so she just wraps her arms around him and lets him talk.

"I like your hair," he murmurs, reaching up to catch a strand of it between two fingers like he's touching something precious. "It reminds me of something."

"What?" she asks.

"Don't know," he says softly. "Something shiny, though. Something right."

She doesn't know why it doesn't bother her to have him so close, talking like that. Might be because they're always close to each other, the boys in the warrens beneath the Citadel, or because he let her touch him first, and did nothing in return but go quiet and almost still beneath her hand, trembling with latent energy. It means something, probably, but it doesn't have to mean anything she doesn't want.

"When Morsov died," he says, "my mate Morsov, he died real chrome. Took a team of buzzards with him, sent 'em all up burning." He looks at her with sudden, startling joy, a flash of frenzy rising again to the surface of his smile. "Reminds me of that."

And _that_ ought to bother her, she thinks - that other side of him, the spark and the fuel, the will to burn. But even when she reminds herself of why it should, it doesn't. There's violence in him, yes, but he's not the only one who wants to ride until there's nothing but dust and smoking debris behind, or to tear down everything ahead just to make it over into something new.

"When we get to the Green Place," she says, but he shakes his head once, a sharp denial. 

"When you get there."

"You're coming with us," she says. He tenses against her, looking west towards the Citadel and the burning sun, and twists his hands in a pattern that looks like it wants to become the V8 salute and never does.

"I live," he mutters. "I die. I live again."

 _Of course,_ Capable thinks. She doesn't have the cruelty to deny it. She swallows down unwanted grief, and touches the scars on his chest the same way she used to touch the engine parts they signify, lightly and with care. She never did become a blackthumb like her mother or an itinerant like her father, and she isn't sure she still has what skill she'd gained, but it doesn't make a difference either way. People aren't machines.

"Tell you a secret?" she says, and he shifts in her arms to look at her like she's promised something brilliant and unreal, or maybe just undeserved.

"Yeah," he says roughly. "Tell me."

She's silent for a moment, and the only sound is the deep purr of engines running smooth and the faltering rhythm of his breathing. No storms rising in the distance, no fires, no drums carried on the wind. It's easy to believe there never will be. She brushes a hand across his brow and back along the curve of his skull, feeling him lean into her touch, and she bends close and whispers something that another stranger told her, so very long ago.

"Everything does."


	7. Death (Furiosa)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for taking so long with this part. Real life got in the way, as it does, but now the whole thing is finally finished.

Furiosa is out hunting when she sees the woman for the first time.

She's just brought down a bird with her sling, and she wades through the marshlands, pushing aside hanging vines and branches in search of the place where it had fallen. Her first kill in a long time, in this lean year, and she's proud of it, eager for something other than bitter roots for the stewpot, even if it's only one of those damnable scrawny crows. But when she gets to where she's going, there's someone else there already, crouching in the rushes with mud up to her knees. A woman in black riding leathers, cradling a small, feathery shape in her hands.

Furiosa almost a slips back into the tangle of trees when she sees her, not wanting to borrow trouble, but anger holds her there. Food is growing too scarce these days, and she's damned if she's going to let some outsider go stealing it. So she reaches for her gun instead, aims and disengages the safety in one swift motion, heart pounding hard and finger resting beside the trigger. She's never had to shoot an unarmed person before. She hopes she can get away with bluffing.

"That's mine," she says. "Drop it and get out, and I won't put a hole between your eyes."

The woman looks up, not a trace of fear or surprise in her. She's very pale, with a looping spiral of black warpaint adorning her face, and her eyes are the color of a starless night. When Furiosa feels that gaze settle on her, it's an effort to keep the gun steady; she wants to run or freeze in place, gone still as some small, scampering thing held unharmed between a wild dog's jaws. Then the feeling fades, and the woman in front of her is only a woman - maybe more of a girl, even, not so much older than Furiosa, her black-painted lips quirking in a smile that's surprisingly friendly for someone held at gunpoint.

"Look again," she says, gesturing down at the bundle of feathers that Furiosa realizes is still lying at her feet. "I haven't taken anything that belongs to you."

And then she pushes herself to her feet, one hand on her knee and the other still holding _whatever it is she's holding_ close to her chest, that thing that isn't Furiosa's next meal. Furiosa catches a glimpse of something shiny around her neck: a piece of silver jewelry formed from two crossed lines with a loop at the top, nothing she recognizes. She's seen crucifixes before, the symbols of some old world religion long dead, but she doesn't think this is this is the same at all. It feels older than the old world, older than the red rocks in the desert, and when Furiosa shivers at the sight of it, it isn't exactly fear.

"Well met, Furiosa of the Vuvalini," the woman says, and gives her a jaunty little wave. "Until we meet again."

She turns and vanishes into the trees before Furiosa can stop her, or demand to know where she heard that name. She seems to vanish too quickly, in truth, and it leaves Furiosa wondering about the campfire stories she's heard, restless phantoms from the time before. She doesn't believe in ghosts, or anything else she can't put a bullet in before it tries to kill her, but she doesn't know what she's just seen, either, only that she's certain she didn't imagine it.

The crow is there on the marshy ground, blood on its feathers, small heart fallen cold. Furiosa gathers it up and takes it with her, and she's still proud of her skill with a sling, her aim and steady hand, but the gun is heavy at her side and less familiar than it had been that morning. She doesn't wonder if she could kill a person, or if she'll ever have to. Everyone can. Everyone will have to. That's life. 

But she leaves that place quickly, doesn't look back and doesn't return, and she never tells anyone about the woman - not her Clan Mother or her Initiate Mother, not even Valkyrie, who gets to hear all of her secrets.

 _Until we meet again,_ she hears sometimes in the back of her mind, out on patrol at her mother's side. Her dreams are haunted for weeks by dark eyes and silver jewelry and the weight of a weapon in her hand, and she can't shake the feeling that if she turned without warning to look behind her, she might see the woman in the shadow of the nearest rock or dune, following along close behind them. She isn't sure whether it's something to hope for or not, and though she can never help hoping all the same, in the dark and silence of a wasteland night long after the campfire has burned to ashes, she doesn't truly believe it will happen. 

It's a long time before it does.

It's a very long time - days and then months beneath desert skies, riding the edge of Vuvalini territory and learning the ways of survival in preparation for her rite of initiation, trading fears and fancies for the anticipation of returning home a woman grown. It's long enough to forget, and when she finally sees the woman again, the only thing she can think is _this isn't real._

*

This isn't real.

Furiosa blinks against the light, breathing slow and even like her mother taught her to keep the pain and the panic under control. She's chained in the back of a truck rattling over uneven ground, and each time the wheels hit a groove or a bump it sends a spike of nausea through her, and bright spots flare and dance in her vision.

She's hallucinating.

Of course she's hallucinating. She's been hit on the head - her memories of the ambush are hazy, beyond a fragmented blur of pain and confusion, but she can remember that much. She can feel blood drying on the side of her face, sticking in her hair, and she's been given no water to drink or cool her skin since their capture. And it's hot in here, with too many other bodies pressed close around her, sweltering in the sun. Women, mostly, some young girls, a few boys. Her mother, handcuffed to the wall across from her, blood soaking her shirt and face grey with pain, too far away for Furiosa to reach but close enough for the labored sound of her breathing to fill the air. And a ghost.

It isn't real. There is no woman in black riding along with them, waiting and watching, and that means maybe none of the rest of this is happening either. Maybe Furiosa will close her eyes, and when she opens them she'll be home again. She laughs at that, almost inaudibly but loud enough to hurt her parched throat, shoulders shaking until she notices her mother watching and forces herself to stop. She's never been very good at lying.

At the end of the first day, they're given water, and at the end of the second, they're given food. Aside from that, nothing changes. Furiosa doesn't weep. She doesn't plead. It wouldn't do any good if she did, but even if it would, she's Vuvalini, and Vuvalini don't abase themselves so.

She holds on to that thought, and tries to take pride in it, but there are tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, and if she doesn't cry, she knows it's only numbness.

Hours pass, and nothing changes. Furiosa fades in and out of consciousness, measures time by the change of light and tries not to think about how she almost recognize the woman she can still see from the corner of her eye, unchained but making no move to leave or to set them free. There's no reason she would. She isn't real.

But with time, Furiosa starts to think of the woman as almost a friend. There's something kindly about her, as she walks among the prisoners, the injured ones, as though a hallucination could offer any comfort at all. When Furiosa looks at her too directly she seems to blur, light bending oddly around her, but she's there, she refuses to vanish, and that shouldn't be a comfort, but it is.

By the end of the third day, Furiosa knows there's no rescue coming. Her mother's face is a mask of pain, eyes glassy with fever, and she can do nothing to change it, only hate the man who fired the bullet and the one who sent the raiders and every single fucker who holds them here in chains. But it doesn't matter who she hates. She's not getting free. Not yet. There's no one here who has a chance of that, except perhaps for the woman walking towards them now, light-footed through the hold.

This time, the woman crouches down in front of Furiosa's mother, takes her head in ghost-pale hands and smooths back her hair and whispers something Furiosa can't hear. There's a shift in the atmosphere, a breath of cool breeze stirring the hot air, and Furiosa sees the deep lines in her mother's face fade into something softer, the peace of sleep after too many restless hours. 

_Thank you,_ she wants to say, and nearly does. _Thank you for helping her when I could do nothing._ But in the time it takes her to make sense of what she's seeing, the woman shimmers and vanishes like a heat mirage, and the rig feels emptier in her wake.

When Furiosa looks again, she sees her mother slumped in her restraints, head hanging slack, and she understands.

*

Furiosa thinks for a long time that what's been taken is something she can't forgive. 

_Death has no right to you,_ she remembers saying to her mother's ghost, knowing that there was no one there to listen. She remembers cursing them all, the sick old tyrant who calls her _wife_ and the white-painted walking dead who obey him, lying awake and comforting herself with the thought of their blood on her hands. In the days after her capture, death itself isn't exempt from her rage.

The shadow of it is a constant presence in this place, never seen but always felt. It lingers in the tunnels beneath the Citadel and dogs the steps of the boys who haunt them, the ones she learns to call brother even as she remembers the weight of shackles and the stench of her mother's blood thick in the air. The familiarity of it is a comfort, and the knowledge that whatever happens, whatever they do to her and whatever she does in turn, there's always one freedom waiting. It isn't long before Furiosa finds herself imagining a woman's face when she thinks of that final promise, and learns to call her friend again.

On her first raid, she paints her face like a War Boy, white as chalk. She blacks her eyes, too, with grease and charcoal, and with one finger she paints a long, thin curl from the corner of her eye in a spiral down her cheek.

_I honor you, my sister. I honor you._

But when she leaps from swaying pole to open car, when she takes her knife and drives it down screaming through her enemy's throat, the woman she half-sees reflected in the dying man's goggles doesn't look honored, and Furiosa doesn't paint her face again.

She doesn't leave her old friend behind her, either. She doesn't imagine she can. Death is _there,_ beside her, behind her, in every bullet and every explosion unfolding like a flower and every time another War Boy whose face she knows falls into fever-dreaming and doesn't wake. She's there when Furiosa drags herself from the smoking wreck of the rig, body ablaze with pain and left arm a mangled ruin, the sun blinding bright and an ocean of desert to cross. And she's there when Furiosa blacks out at last, with the Citadel looming above her, and wakes in the cool dimness of the infirmary with a tube in her arm.

Her right arm. The other one is - 

_Don't think about that now._

Not thinking is easier than it should be. They've given her something for the pain, and it slows her mind, makes the seconds slide into one another and the objects in the room shift oddly when she doesn't look at them straight.

A flash of motion overhead catches her attention. Her eyes fix on a swinging shape kicking feebly above her, bound and dangling from an iron cage. His blood is dripping into a clear tube, dark and sluggish, and she follows the line of it to the crook of her own elbow.

She looks up again, unable to stop herself, and sees him looking back, eyes wide and wild and terrified. A wastelander, a feral, the sort of easy prey her clan used to capture in their traps. Always killed them quickly, at least, when they needed to kill at all. And with that thought, she becomes aware that there's someone else there too, sitting at the foot of her cot: a woman in black, a dream that Furiosa remembers.

She thinks she knows what will happen next. It doesn't frighten her, though perhaps that's only the drugs. But the woman only reaches up, stills the swinging chain with a care that Furiosa has almost forgotten could be real. She brushes a hand down the feral man's face, and closes his eyes as his struggles slow and cease. When she leaves, she doesn't glance in Furiosa's direction.

 _Come back,_ Furiosa wants to say, but her throat is dry and her mouth won't work, and she knows that the woman was never there for her.

That's a good thing, she tells herself, as her eyes close again and she slips back down into darkness. She can't die before she's done what needs doing and gotten close enough to choke the life out of old Joe with her own hands, or drive a knife to the hilt into his eye. That end is the only thing that matters, and she won't have it stolen from her by weakness. She knows that. It's never been a matter of choice.

*

"Used up the last of a good bloodbag for you," Organic tells her later, once she's coherent enough to speak and listen, and strong enough to lift her head more than a few centimeters from the cot. "Immortan's orders. Anything for the one who won him that fight, eh, _Imperator?_ "

She's been promoted. He grins, teeth glinting in the half-light. Furiosa remembers the hanging man and his cage, and weariness washes over her.

"Tell him " she says, voice rusty. "Tell him I'm grateful."

*

Is she grateful?

She doesn't know. Mary Jo Bassa's daughter once spit in the Immortan's eye and laughed about it later, after her punishment was over. Imperator Furiosa drives out behind the wheel of the War Rig with a pack of howling War Boys and a sigil on her belt to match the brand burned into her skin. She raids and kills like she was born to it, and one day, Imperator Furiosa brings back a girl in chains.

 _A proof of loyalty,_ she thinks, and doesn't let herself think of any of the rest of it, and it's an undeserved mercy that the girl doesn't remind her very much of anyone she used to know. She's small and fragile, a half-starved child with her dark hair dirty from the wastes, and still too healthy and whole for her image to fit anywhere outside a pretty cage or a memory of green. But she doesn't cry, only stares silently ahead, and Furiosa wants to tell her that it won't be bad, it's better than life in the desert and at least she has time.

It's a lie, of course. She knows it's a lie even before she drags the girl stumbling to her prison and Angharad's steely-eyed care, and feels the judgment of the first four settle on her. But in the green room outside the vault, with no one watching, Furiosa grabs her by the arm roughly enough to make her flinch and hisses, "it won't last forever."

She doesn't know what she means by it. Not then, or when she first catches Toast and Angharad watching her with a wariness tinged with more speculation than hate. Not until a morning years after she first learns Cheedo's name and decides not to forget it, when she hears of the building storm she's been waiting for and one meaning slides sharply, irrevocably, into another.

It isn't death that will break those chains. It won't last because it's changing _now_.

*

The next time Furiosa wakes in a Citadel bed, she's wrapped in bandages and curled around a knot of pain, and it doesn't register immediately that everything she knows is different now. They haven't given her any drugs this time, and she's glad of it even though it hurts; whoever treated her knew her well. She's not alone, but the only person watching from a chair by the bed is a grey-haired Vuvalini whose name she doesn't know, and this time, she _is_ grateful.

"The battle," she says, as soon as she can say anything. "How many? Who?"

The woman watches her for a long moment, grave and silent, and then she starts to speak. Furiosa listens.

She had known, when she gave the order to turn and ride like hell to the west, that most of them wouldn't make it through. They knew it too, the War Boy and the fool, the sharp-eyed elders and the women she once thought soft. That's the way it is, in war and in the wastes, but the fool was right; she also knew who they would find waiting for them in the Salt, and the toll to pay to turn away from her. It still hurts that she doesn't find out until after who all of them were.

She keeps a tally of names in her head as she learns them, dead and missing, a few she doesn't recognize and too many she does. There's the Keeper, with her task and her name passed along to the daughter she never gave birth to. Valkyrie, lost and found and lost again. Furiosa crafts a token of black feathers in her honor, and reminds herself, though she doesn't know where the thought came from, that there's nothing gone that could ever belong to the ones who killed her.

As for the other survivors, they mourn, each in their way. Capable hangs a steering wheel from the cliff in her War Boy's memory, and they all work to build a grave marker for Angharad atop the Citadel, surrounded by green and hung with bits of scrap that clatter and ring when the wind blows through them. Cheedo talks a lot about the constellations she learned from books, and how people used to believe that the gods set heroes up in the sky, the ones whose deeds were too great to be forgotten. It isn't true and it doesn't change anything, but it's a nice thought.

And after Furiosa has recovered enough to travel alone through dangerous territory, she takes one of the remaining motorcycles and drives east. She stops on a cliffside when she sees the canyon rising on the horizon, dismounts with the sun sinking low behind her and settles in to keep her vigil for the ones who won't be remembered. She calls their names to mind, and their faces: white-painted and scarred, brutal and bloodthirsty, the ones Furiosa wept for as she killed and the ones she killed without regret. She was one of them once. Part of her still is, and always will be.

Some time after midnight and before morning, she thinks she sees a figure in black down among the rocks and the wreckage, someone who looks up to see her there at the edge of the cliff, but she couldn't say for certain. She doesn't know if it's the woman or just some scavenger, come to pick clean the bones of vehicles for the sake of their own survival.

They're not enemies, though. That much, Furiosa is sure of.

*

It's a long time before Furiosa sees the woman again. Almost, but not quite, long enough to forget.

When she does, it's on a quiet night well past sundown, and the halls are near empty as she makes her way from her bedchamber to the top of the Citadel. She isn't feeling melancholy - she's never had the patience for that - but she can't sleep, and the past is weighing heavier on her than the present. On nights when that happens, it's always the same place she returns to, and she could find her way there in her sleep.

She goes still at the sight of someone waiting for her by the stairwell, but she doesn't reach for the gun at her hip as she once might have, not even very long ago. It's only the Dag's boy, after all, gentle-hearted and slow to speak, with nothing of the Immortan's legacy about him except for a certain way of spinning stories and making you want to believe them. There's something to be said for prophecies that don't come true, and for gods whose children are kinder than they ever were.

But he's not such a boy any longer, Furiosa realizes. His face is seamed and sun-worn, his back bent from long years of labor, and when she thinks on it, it occurs to her that he has children of his own. Strange, then, that he seems so young to her now, and strange too that she can't remember his name. No matter. It will come back to her. These things always do.

He holds out a hand to her, looking to the steps, and she pauses. She could make the climb alone. She's forced herself through greater weariness than this. But there's no reason to, so she lets him take her arm, her metal one, and leans on him instead of her walking stick as they make the slow ascent to the gardens atop the bluff. She doesn't count the steps up. She knows every one of them, uneven beneath her feet, just as she knows the tremor in her legs and the shortness of breath, and the fierce little leap of her heart as the doors swing open and the sky is revealed to her again.

The air smells sweet up here, like desert sage and cactus flower, and the stars are close and bright above. She lets go of the Dag's boy's arm and takes a step away, letting the walking stick take her weight, and he watches with a mixture of respect and concern that leaves her feeling all her years and more.

 _Dreamer,_ she thinks. That was it. Not the kind of name that got given to anyone when she was young, but she isn't young, and the world has changed, and started spinning on without her. If the people who belong to it now want to give their children foolish names, she's hardly going to argue. After all - she smiles in recollection - it's not such a terrible thing, to be a fool.

"Imperator? Shall I stay?" he asks, in that quiet, deferential voice of his. Dreamer indeed. Her first impulse is to think that the old world would have eaten him alive, but when she thinks again, she's not so sure. Strength takes root in unexpected places; surely his mother and her gardens are proof enough of that.

"No," she says. "Come find me in an hour, if you want. Until then, I think I'd like to be alone."

He lingers at the door for a second, no doubt reluctant to leave his relic of an Imperator behind, lest she crumble into dust as soon as the wind picks up. But she gestures him briskly away, and he salutes, hand to heart, and the door falls shut behind him.

She isn't alone, though. She sees that as soon as she turns to face the east and finds a woman there, sitting cross-legged on a patch of scrubby grass and surrounded by tiny white flowers. It's a Vuvalini garment that she wears this time, a patterned shawl wrapped around her shoulders and tied in a style that Furiosa hasn't seen since childhood. It's then that she understands that this is the last time.

There's a moment of fear, sharp in the back of her throat, more instinctive than rational. Then it fades, and she's left with the same curious calm that she'd felt driving into the sandstorm, seeing that wall of dust and lightning rise up to greet her - all decisions made, nothing left but to ride and see where the road leads her. She nods to the woman like the old friend she is, and says, "I know you, don't I?"

"Very well," the woman replies. Her voice is fond, amused, and Angharad's wind chimes echo in the silence it leaves behind. Perhaps all is forgiven, then, after all. Furiosa goes to sit beside her, easing her aching body down onto the dusty ground with a grunt of effort, and let's her walking stick fall forgotten at her side. She won't be needing it again.

"It was kind of you," she says, "to meet me here."

The woman shakes her head, hair like spilled oil just brushing the nape of her neck, and says, "I am not kind. You know that." But her smile gives the lie to that, and Furiosa remembers how she had touched the face of that man in chains so many years ago, tenderly, soothing away the last of his pain. The only guarantee of mercy this world has to offer.

"It was kind," she says. "I'm ready."

She had hoped to die in battle once, and not only in her youth, but this is better. There are plants here. They'll feed her body to them when she's gone, and that's something to be glad of, whatever happens to the rest of her. She's ready, and when she offers her hand, the woman clasps it like it's a deal sealed, draws her to her feet as the desert fades to darkness. She feels the last of her breath slipping from her lungs, and it's not so hard, this time, to let it go.

Something brushes past her, a rush of wind, or wings. A flash of silver, and then nothing at all.

Death lets go of her hand, and everything changes.


End file.
